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Full Version: Is Commons about to get a warning pop-up?
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EricBarbour
I saw it on the Foundation-L, and here it is.

And people are already jeering it.

(And directly below it, is a discussion about the discovery of some images in Category:SuicideGirls that are apparently copyrighted. Oopsie! laugh.gif I wish someone would ask them: what is the "educational value" of 173 girlie pics apparently stolen from suicidegirls.com via Flickr?)
jayvdb
QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Tue 11th May 2010, 8:15am) *

(And directly below it, is a discussion about the discovery of some images in Category:SuicideGirls that are apparently copyrighted. Oopsie! laugh.gif I wish someone would ask them: what is the "educational value" of 173 girlie pics apparently stolen from suicidegirls.com via Flickr?)

If there is anything to Ottava's grandstanding there, it is that suicidegirls.com may be inappropriately releasing images from their collection as CC-BY. My guess is that their legalese covers the images on their website, most of which are members-only and therefore have a commercial value to suicidegirls.com, and that they have the necessary agreement with the subjects for images that they put on flickr.com.
EricBarbour
QUOTE(jayvdb @ Tue 11th May 2010, 2:10am) *
If there is anything to Ottava's grandstanding there, it is that suicidegirls.com may be inappropriately releasing images from their collection as CC-BY. My guess is that their legalese covers the images on their website, most of which are members-only and therefore have a commercial value to suicidegirls.com, and that they have the necessary agreement with the subjects for images that they put on flickr.com.

Well, then, don't you think that until the copyright status is better confirmed,
your Wiki-friends should manfully try to eschew posting these tattoo-girly pics to Commons?

Are the hot-alterna-babe piccies so damned important to this so-called "encyclopedia",
that they are worth risking a lawsuit over?

And as usual/expected, the discussion about the warning slowly fell apart, with no consensus. Who the hell is this NeilK? He claims to be a developer with the Usability Initiative---a project with an almost-completely blank wiki. He could stick to something he knows about....

Stumbling around with the random button brought this up, an actual usability study. I'm personally not impressed. At least they found out that WP's Help function is useless......
jayvdb
QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Tue 11th May 2010, 9:19pm) *

Well, then, don't you think that until the copyright status is better confirmed,
your Wiki-friends should manfully try to eschew posting these tattoo-girly pics to Commons?

Are the hot-alterna-babe piccies so damned important to this so-called "encyclopedia",
that they are worth risking a lawsuit over?

No. I'm not wasting my time on what appears to be a fruitless approach to try to remove some raunchy images from Commons. SuicideGirls is a legal entity, they are posting these images under the CC-BY license onto Flickr, and the CC-BY license is a legal document. If they are breaking the law, their members (the subjects in these images) should take them to court, or at least raise a public ruckus.
If there was the slightest hint that these images were not appropriately released, such as SuicideGirls changing the license on these flickr images, I would delete them and congratulate Ottava for bringing this to a head. But deleting them from Commons for copyright reasons without any factual basis does not fix the problem.
Any lawsuit will be aimed squarely at SuicideGirls.

Commons is not an encyclopedia; it is a media repository. I don't think it needs ~170 images of these chicks, however a discussion about which ones to delete isn't worth the time spent on it at the moment. There are more important problems, and lower hanging fruit. The community needs to improve it's scope, or at least add some limits to the amount of objectionable material and critical evaluation about the same, but it will always contain material that is objectionable to some, and it will always have more objectionable material than would appear in a more focused work like an encyclopedia. As a result, I think it is essential that Wikimedia Commons goes the extra mile to label content in a way that content filters work effortlessly, like using ICRA labels in the W3C POWDER recommendation.
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